Support OSI's research on DOSP

[chadwhitacre]

OSI is conducting "[r]esearch on delayed open source publication (DOSP): the practice of publishing a software release under a proprietary license, then later publishing that release's source code under an open source license." Sentry is a sponsor of this research, and we welcome others to join us. The expectation is that we'll end up with a whitepaper later this year.

Final

• https://opensource.org/dosp

Announcements

• A historic view of the practice to delay releasing Open Source software: OSI’s report (OSI)
• Now’s The Time For Delayed Open Source (Sentry)

Press

• Delayed Open Source Publication Emerges as Open Source Rival (sjvn)

[djc]

At least for me, I wonder how important the DOSP aspect really is? To me, the most helpful aspect of the BUSL with the additional use grant as discussed in #4 is really the idea that you can fully use the product internally (including with modifications) without having to worry about licensing unless you're spinning up a competing service.

Have you gotten concrete feedback for the case of Sentry about customers specifically being interested in the ability to get access to the more permissively licensed code in time?

[chadwhitacre]

The feeling at Sentry is that eventually releasing under an OSI-approved license demonstrates a commitment to Open Source that a BUSL w/o conversion would not. For us it's less about customers and more about other devs being able to learn from and reuse our code over time.

@kfogel Does your research address motivations on the part of licensors/authors? How about uptake patterns on the part of the community post-delayed-release?

[chadwhitacre]

The paper is done! 💃

I haven't seen it announced publicly yet though ...

[chadwhitacre]

Here it is in LaTeX. 😁

[kfogel]

Hi, @chadwhitacre! Sorry I didn't see the notification from when you nick-flagged me above exactly a month ago (GitHub notifications, even when they arrive by email, don't have a lot of the metadata that I normally use to route my email, so I generally miss them unless I was expecting them and set things up in advance to route them correctly).

The paper raises the question of contributor motivations, and contribution trends more generally, as an area for further research. This paper is really just a survey, though: it looks over the landscape or patterns, and tries to identify questions to ask next. We agree with you and @djc that that's one of the most important questions.

[kfogel]

@chadwhitacre We're working with OSI to produce a nicely-formatted version with Pleasing Design Elements, by the way, so although the content of the paper is complete (modulo any last-minute bug reports), it's not been officially announced yet. That'll happen when the glossy copy is ready.

[chadwhitacre]

Announcement is tomorrow! 🙌

[kfogel]

Aaaaaaand... it's out!

https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication/

https://blog.opensource.org/a-historic-view-of-the-practice-to-delay-releasing-open-source-software-osis-report/